Death at Christy Burke's Read Online Free PDF Page A

flew in from as far away as Australia for it. They’re not people of means; they can’t afford to change their flights, buy new airline tickets. If the funeral doesn’t go ahead tomorrow, those people will miss seeing him laid to rest.”
    “I don’t understand. What’s the holdup?”
    “There were some matters to be negotiated. Things are tense in Endastown these days. Some of the boys were going to read a statement that accuses the security forces and the British Army of turning a blind eye — more like giving the wink of an eye — to assassinations carried out by the UDA and other paramilitary groups. Word went round about the planned speech, and they got a belt of the crozier.”
    “I take it that means the bishop disapproved,” Monty interjected.
    “The bishop indeed. The Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland.”
    “Some crozier, some belt.”
    “Exactly, Monty. Himself considers the statement too inflammatory. The Dignan people have gone out of their way to compromise. They brought in a negotiator from here. Somebody known to you and me, in fact, Brennan. Anyway they’ve agreed to modify the statement. Water it down. And they’ve even agreed that Dermot Cooney — one of the lads who’s a little hotheaded — will not be reading it as planned. Somebody else will. So they rescheduled it for tomorrow. Now they’ve got the Orange Order to contend with.”
    “How’s that?” Monty asked.
    “Well, you know what day tomorrow is.”
    “July the twelfth. Ah yes, the Glorious Twelfth.”
    “Orangemen’s Day. Wouldn’t I like to be up there to peel a few of them myself. Fuckin’ marching season. I’d have them marching. Right off the edge of this island!”
    “Finn,” Brennan cautioned.
    “I don’t get it,” Monty said. “What’s that got to do with a Catholic funeral?”
    “Well, it’s like this. They’re expecting a huge crowd of mourners for the Dignan send-off. Buses full of people from here as well as people from all over the North. The time of the funeral procession will conflict directly with the Orange march.”
    “So why don’t they change it?”
    “Why doesn’t who change what ?” Finn snapped.
    “Can’t they schedule things so that both events can take place?”
    “No, they cannot. Or will not, in the case of the Orangemen. We, that is, the Catholics, cannot change the time of Rory’s funeral. There’s another funeral Mass scheduled in the church in the morning. The only Catholic church in the town. And the Aussies have to fly out just after tea time. So it has to be in the afternoon. And that’s when the Orange eejits march through the town beating their drums and crowing about the victory of King William of Orange over the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690. Now they’re trying to get another victory over us, three hundred years later.”
    This was the kind of talk Michael had heard around the family table all the time he was growing up. He was well aware of the past three hundred years of Irish history. Eight hundred years, really, if you measured from the time the English first landed in Ireland. It was eight hundred years exactly between the Anglo-Norman Invasion of 1169 and the beginning of the modern-day Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969. Things had always been bad for Catholics up there. The Loyalists, those who wanted to remain united with Britain instead of with the Catholic republic to the south, had gerrymandered the electoral boundaries to make sure they held on to political power; this enabled them to discriminate against the Catholics when it came to jobs and housing. Catholics began to demand their civil rights in the late 1960s, resulting in beatings from the police. It was in 1969 that the British Army was sent in to the northern counties. The army was still there. More than three thousand people — soldiers, Republican and Loyalist paramilitary forces, Catholic and Protestant civilians — had been killed in the